Volume 11 Number 3

Summer 2002

Special Reports

Parables of Hope and Disappointment
Martin Krygier

In July 2001, the World Congress of the International Institute of Sociology was held in Krakow. The theme of the congress was "The Moral Fabric of Contemporary Societies." It included a plenary session on "Eastern Europe after Communism: Promises and Disappointments." What follows are my remarks at that session, updated in minor ways.

Asked recently to join this panel, I wondered what might be most appropriate to offer. Given the moral concerns of this congress and its location, the religious center of Poland, I sought biblical inspiration. What follows are ten parables. The number is, of course, arbitrary. There could be more or less, and no one remembers how many parables there are in the Bible. Still, once I had passed three, it seemed inappropriate to stop at nine or go on to eleven. Like three, after all, ten has a biblical resonance.

My parables begin with hopes rather than promises, because my memories of 1989 are more of the former than the latter. One quickly forgets the nervousness (and widespread pessimism) of 1989, too easily imagining retrospectively that everyone thought the future would be rosy or easy. That is not what I recall. Still, hopes were high.

It is common to think of disappointment as a natural and direct response to distressing developments, and then go on to ask what was it about these developments that led to the disappointment. To seek the sources of disappointment in later results, in other words, rather than in earlier anticipations. And of course, a lot has happened in the region, especially in its southern and eastern parts, that must disappoint anyone, whatever their hopes. However, I am intrigued with the other end: the hopes themselves. Some disappointments follow from, indeed sometimes flow inevitably from, the nature of the originating hope. Some hopes are inherently unrealizable, and my first parable has to do with them. However, there are other sorts of hopes that spawn disappointment precisely when they are realized, and the rest of my discussion will be concerned with hopes of that sort.

This is not the whole of the story, and in some countries it is only a small part of it. By emphasizing this aspect I do not mean to diminish or trivialize the more profound problems-of which there have been plenty that would distress anyone who had to endure them. Yet, since memories are short and local pastures so easily can seem brown, it is perhaps worth recalling that not everything that disappoints us flows from what it has strangely brought us to. Some comes from what we ourselves bring to it.

The significance of disappointment-spawning hopes varies, as does the increasingly diverse range of postcommunist experiences. I know Poland best, and there I think the character of originating hopes plays an important part in subsequent disappointments, a part that is often overlooked. It is not insignificant in quite a few other countries as well.

Parables are usually identified by name, the parable of the Good Samaritan or the parable of the Prodigal Son, for example, and are often recalled by those names, when people have forgotten all else. In keeping with that tradition I will name each parable and then explain it.

1. Impossible dreams
Adam Michnik once distinguished two sorts of former dissidents: those who hated communism because they didn't like dictatorship, and those who hated it because it failed to recognize they were greater than Homer. Some of the former, like Michnik himself, are pleased with postcommunism since they are now free. The latter generally are not, since they are still ranked behind Homer. There are parallels to this sort of frustration in many domains of postcommunist life. Some people hoped that once communism was removed, their own or their country's rise would be simply unstoppable. Disappointment followed, in direct proportion to the magniloquence of the ambition, like night after day. And this might have been predicted. If fervent hopes cannot be realized, they are likely to lead to disappointment, and if the hopes are sufficiently grandiose, disappointment will not only be inevitable but great. Any attempt to satisfy such hopes is bound to disappoint.

2. The Irish question
In 1066 and All That,1 that wonderful introduction to the whole of English history from its beginning as "top nation" until its Fukuyamaesque end (when America became "clearly top nation, and History came to a ."), it was explained that nineteenth-century British prime minister Gladstone "spent his declining years trying to guess the answer to the Irish Question; unfortunately, whenever he was getting warm, the Irish secretly changed the Question." Questions in this region, too, have changed over time. In the first years after the collapse, many novelties-the end of communist despotism, the first free elections, politicians who were voted out of office, and then left, court decisions that were obediently followed by those in power-were seen as remarkable achievements in those countries where they occurred. As indeed they were. Now, these things are taken for granted in countries like Hungary and Poland and some other countries, too. Sights have been set higher. Different questions are being put, and many people will not be satisfied until they receive satisfactory answers. When they do, they will ask further questions.

3. The wisdom of Chou En-lai
Those who imagined that, after the collapse of communism, it could be easy and quick to establish democracy, rule of law, prosperity, and equality-together and at once-were doomed to disappointment. But 12 years is a short time in the development of the institutions of any social order, unless they collapse quickly. Recall Chou En-lai's response, when asked to assess the results of the French Revolution: it is too soon to tell.

4. Silly questions, silly answers
Many postcommunist initiatives are rightly regarded with disappointment and not only because they fail to satisfy bizarre or shifting or premature expectations. For some answers (good or bad doesn't really matter) are bound to frustrate, since they respond to bad questions or questions that are badly posed. Here the problem is not that the expectations are unfulfillable or that they change. Rather it is that fulfilling them-however successfully-is often the wrong thing to try to do.
That problem will occur whenever the question is foolish in principle, or, as a poor translation of a sensible question, it becomes foolish in context. Certain questions of this second sort have been common among legal missionaries from self-confident metropoles and their eager converts.

The sensible, but difficult, question often asked is: What can be done about what works badly here? That is often translated, particularly by western missionaries and advisers in the region, as: What works well at home, or in "normal" countries, or in the West? When the first question becomes the second without further thought, or indeed whenever it is answered without first finding answers to deeper questions about the conditions and possibilities of institutional transplantation-about what is left behind in transportation and what is likely to be met on arrival, about how to mesh with (and yet transform) local institutions, expectations, social interests, history-such questions will often lead to answers that look foolish, and might well be. But a deeper truth is that any answer will be foolish, however clever it is, so long as it is the answer to a silly question. This sort of disappointment will attend many local imitations of the acquis communautaire, for example.

5. The seven-year itch
Some people get exactly what they want when they marry, but they find, after some time, that it does not satisfy them. This phenomenon is known in English as the seven-year itch. Similarly, some hopes have issued in disappointment in the region, even though they were fully realized. Communism collapsed, freedom of speech ensued, capital flowed in (to some countries), queues disappeared, a variety of goods appeared on shelves. And still they are disappointed. You find such disappointment expressed, for example, in aphorisms like, "We wanted justice, we got the rule of law," or, "We wanted civil society, we got NGOs" (even though the rule of law and NGOs once seemed the unattainable jewels of the supposedly normal West to many in the abnormal East). People who had to bribe shop assistants to set aside toilet paper, or who, plastic bag in hand, had to engage in hunting expeditions for the same precious commodity, or had to latch onto queues for who knows what, just in case there was something worth getting at the other end, now are unsatisfied by the arid impersonality, predictability, and speed of their visits to the supermarket.

6. The aria competition
There is a story about an aria competition, in which the second contestant was awarded the prize as soon as the first stopped singing. The judges presumed that whoever followed the first competitor could not be worse. People often thought that way about communism. Thus it was common (and right) to attribute many of the worst problems of communism to its monopolistic and inescapable state. Many drew from this accurate diagnosis the prescription that the state's power should be drastically diminished. The more the better. Unfortunately, in some of the most miserable postcommunist societies, that is precisely what happened. Soon, fear of the state was succeeded by fear of real and imagined criminality. People on fixed incomes or state subsidies and salaries had to face the decline, sometimes collapse, of state budgets. Then there was the price to everyone of a state that cannot pay its officials, enforce its judgments, collect taxes, and so on.2 Not to mention the gobbling up of state assets, on the cheap, by oligarchs, tycoons, biznesmeni, and so on. Here the failure of social and political theory was a failure to realize that the opposite of a bad thing is not necessarily a good thing. One might rather hope for an altogether different thing, such as a state that is strong in a way different from that which is familiar-not despotically, for example, but infrastructurally.3

Again, an example particularly evident in Poland is the reaction to the now-fulfilled hope that politicians or the group they belong to or the "political class," as it is called there, would be different from what went before. The ideal type of the former was a disciplined single party, committed to Marxist ideology, and devoted to the achievement of communism, or, more prosaically by the end, to the maintenance of pervasive party control. The government in power when these remarks were first made (July 2001) faithfully fulfilled the dream of a change to all that by being chaotic, undisciplined, publicly committed to no ideology or too many, and devoted to capitalism, indeed, so keen to promote it by personal example, such as corrupt openness to bribes and lobbying, that it was hard to find word of anything else in Polish newspapers, apart from advertisements. And still some ingrates were unsatisfied, so unsatisfied, in fact, that they recently and not for the first time voted in the successor party to that of the former communists, filled though it is with faces familiar to anyone with a long memory.

A contrasting dream fulfilled in Poland and several other countries, was for a "rule of law revolution" that eschewed the brutality of communist and other revolutions. One of the emblems of this new alternative was the lack of vengefulness against former agents of the communist state. That has been so well achieved that a major disappointment, expressed publicly, today flows from the successful enrichment of former apparatchiks, managers, secret police, and nomenklatura generally, who trade off little-disturbed networks of connection, information, and thus power.

The most tragic examples of prizes awarded too soon are connected with one of the great and realized hopes of late communism: national independence. In Poland, Hungary, and other countries with few or small national minorities, it was a hope not merely realized but largely salutary in its consequences. In several other countries, it was a source of overwhelming calamity. In Yugoslavia, it was such a calamity that it appears in some circumstances that the second competitor (or successor social system) might even be worse than the first, to which it was not unrelated.

7. No such thing as a free lunch
Some people believed that everything they hoped for could be cost-free, yet many costs of transformation were inevitable. If not taken into account, disappointment was bound to follow. And, indeed, many costs occurred which surprised everyone, and some of these have been very painful. Partly this was a failure of the social theory behind the original hopes, so the realization of the prices to be paid is more painful than anyone expected.

Some of these costs were inevitable aspects of transformation, such as the inequalities attendant on capitalism; social, psychic, and economic dislocation; political, legal, and other inexperience; and many of the other things that make life hard in the new postcommunist world. Some were not inevitable, but predictable, such as the time it all takes. Some of the worst, such as the efflorescence of predatory nationalism in some but by no means all parts of the region, were predicted by no one. Many of these costs are very hard to bear.

8. But send the bill to the right address
Some hoped that when communism collapsed, it would be replaced as night by day. Instead, much of it has stayed around, including many structures and processes that pollute the atmosphere literally and metaphorically, with many costs still being paid. These are arguably better attributed to what went before than to what is done now, but commonly are not.

9. The aesthetics of hope, or the McDonald's problem
Isaiah Berlin liked to quote an American philosopher's aphorism that "we have no reason for supposing that the truth, when it is discovered, will necessarily prove interesting." Analogously, we had no reason for supposing that postcommunist democracy, rule of law, and market economy, if attained, would prove enchanting-particularly, once memories of the alternative had worn away. But many people imagined otherwise and are, therefore, distressed to find even the most successful postcommunist orders so tacky. They bemoan the booming of McDonald's just as they do supermarkets, sometimes nostalgically recalling, sometimes frivolously forgetting, that communism was rich in neither.

10. The monism of hope; the plurality of disappointments
Another insight of Berlin's, on which he insisted with greater frequency than he quoted the above aphorism, was that not everything we want is going to be compatible with everything else we want. The postcommunist experience, even in its most successful versions, confirms that in spades. Many initial hopes were monistic, in Berlin's sense: the end of communism would deliver what we want, and not what we did not want. Instead it has, at times, delivered both. It is a pity, perhaps, but if Berlin is right it cannot be escaped. For since it is a truth, not just of postcommunism, but of the human condition, and that, the Bible tells us, is hard to avoid in this life.

Martin Krygier is professor of law, University of New South Wales, Australia. He has been visiting fellow at the Collegium Budapest and visiting professor at the Central European University. He writes on postcommunist legal, political, and social developments and has lectured in many countries in the region.

NOTES

1. More precisely, W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman, 1066 and All That: A Memorable History of England, Comprising All the Parts You Can Remember Including One Hundred and Three Good Things, Five Bad Kings, and Two Genuine Dates, 10th edition (London: Methuen, 1931).
2. See Stephen Holmes, "What Russia Teaches Us Now: How Weak States Threaten Freedom," Prospect 33 (July-August 1997), pp. 30-34.
3. See my "Virtuous Circles: Antipodean Reflections on Power, Institutions, and Civil Society," Eastern European Politics and Societies 11, no. 1 (Winter 1997), pp. 36-88.

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